STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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On Seamus Heaney
RF Foster takes the measure of one of the most powerful wordsmiths of the 20th century
NATIONAL TREASURE: Seamus Heaney
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
THIS survey of the life and work of the late Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s national poet and Nobel Laureate, was published in the month of John Hume’s death — another Nobel Prize winner and a schoolmate of Heaney’s — and the book gives a timely perspective on the Northern Irish Troubles as experienced and responded to in Heaney’s work.
Its author, historian RF Foster, charts Heaney’s developing awareness of the need to create form out of
the chaos of atrocity, not only in his writing but in his choices of allegiance and he chooses, beyond any cause, the independence of the artist in following the dictates of his art form.
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